


i'm almost deserving (when i get close to you)

by Zari_x_Charlie (SuperSanversShipper)



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: :(, Angst, F/F, a lot of sad zari feels abt missing amaya and behrad, canon character death, canon compliant technically???, inconclusive-ish ending, pls look at the authors note for more trigger warnings pls this isn't a super happy fic, post s3-finale, tw// depressive themes, tw// drowning, zari tomaz centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-11-23
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:55:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27229207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SuperSanversShipper/pseuds/Zari_x_Charlie
Summary: Something about the ship makes Zari feel like she’s drowning.She doesn’t know what she’s drowning in.ORAmaya leaves. Zari struggles. Set between s3 and s4.
Relationships: Amaya Jiwe/Zari Tomaz | Zari Tarazi, Behrad Tomaz | Behrad Tarazi & Zari Tomaz | Zari Tarazi
Kudos: 2





	i'm almost deserving (when i get close to you)

**Author's Note:**

> major trigger warning for drowning, depressive themes, references to death, implications of non-canon deaths of major characters, discussion of canon deaths  
> also this is. vague. but also very angsty so if thats not what you’re looking for,,,, yh.  
> Title from Island by SVRCINA, which i highly recommend listening to while reading this

Something about the ship makes Zari feel like she’s drowning.

Drowning — feeling cold waves wash over her, their gentle pressure so contrasted by her own frantic response, feeling  _ something _ dripping into her lungs and filling them  _ up, up, up _ until she can’t breathe anymore. Drowning — fighting against the current to pull herself to the surface even though she knows she can’t win, fighting against the near-silent force that’s dragging her down inch by inch. Drowning — clawing at her own throat to try and pull the liquid, any liquid, out of it, clawing for even a single breath of air to help her last longer.

She’s drowning.

She doesn’t know what she’s drowning in.

* * *

They come back from Aruba — from beaches and sunlight and cocktails and Sara impressing everyone with her abs right before she falls off her surfboard into the deep blue of ocean water — and somehow, even though Zari has seen it in worse shape, the ship feels like it’s falling apart.

They come back from Aruba, and within the hour, Zari’s forgotten again what it feels like to be surrounded by love and warmth and joy and laughter. So she wanders.

She finds Ray in the lab, humming a jaunty tune — something befitting a slightly silly, over-the-top musical comedy — and wiping away at equations on the board. Every so often he takes an opportunity to slip into a little happy jig as he traipses around the room, just ever so slightly off the beat of his song. But something about his presence radiates  _ warmth _ and contentment, and Zari feels the urge to go in and talk to him, distract herself from the way she can’t quite stand to be in this ship right now.

But then he trips over his own feet and knocks something off a table and then his shoulders slump and Zari wants to  _ run away, run away, run away _ . A second passes, silent and fleeting and mourning, and she watches him bend over, and gently lift a pair of thick glasses, with heavy-set jet-black frames. He sighs, and it bounces around the room like his song had been, earlier, and she can’t help but stand there as he folds them and places them on the table once more, right next to a chair with a leather jacket draped neatly over it.

* * *

Her father had taught her how to swim when she was five, just half a decade before ARGUS came into absolute power.

He’d held onto her hands as she’d kicked and paddled and fearfully ducked her head into the water,  _ not breathing, not breathing, not breathing _ , and he’d let her keep her floaties on when he took her to splash around the deep end of the pool.

* * *

She walks to the laundry room, next, for want of anything else to do. She sees Mick, standing there, aggressively turning his clothes inside out, and she swallows something between a cackle and a sob at the sight. She wants to smile, almost, and she wants to scream, definitely, and she wants the ground to open up and swallow her whole and take her back to when she was a child, holding onto her father and being afraid to breathe.

He turns a little, to where she stands with her feet rooted to the spot, and he looks at her with a crinkle between his eyebrows. She tilts her head up a little, trying to exude confidence and wishing she was still afraid of breathing because her breaths sound harsh and angry to her own ears.

He scrutinises her, once more — and she’s struck again by the thought that if she ever uses that word with him now, she’d know he’d be lying when he pretends not to understand it — before he nods and stuffs the rest of his laundry into the washer, automatically turning it on. He walks out, and she steps aside to let him pass, finally pulling away from where her feet had grown roots. She’s not sure why she goes up to his laundry basket, but when she does, she sees a memory flasher sitting next to a pirate’s hat.

* * *

She doesn’t run into Nate. 

She doesn’t  _ try _ to run into Nate.

She avoids him the same way she avoids the whipped cream cans sitting in the back of the fridge, and she avoids him the same way she avoids the library, and she avoids him the same way she avoids looking at the bright blues of the team’s old disco outfits.

She avoids him the same way she’d avoided her parents eyes, after she’d left Behrad to die.

* * *

She’s never wanted to forget most of her swimming lessons with her father in the tiny, dingy apartment pool she’d lived near till she was seven, even though most of her friends — her white, Christian friends who sometimes snickered behind their hands when Zari’s mother came to pick her up dressed in her hijab — had been taught by actual swimming instructors at the rec center, in proper Olympic-sized pools.

But she’s always wanted to forget the first time she’d pulled Behrad into a pool — empty and dirty and walls smoothed by people jumping into them and scrambling to get back up — hiding from an ARGUS patrol. She’d been twenty-one, and he’d been twelve, and Zari’d been sent out to fetch him after he’d missed the curfew  _ again _ , for the third day in a row.

And she’d had every intent of leaping down his throat, of telling him  _ exactly _ how stupid it was to try staying out so late when he  _ knew _ what ARGUS would do to him if they found him, especially with the medallion — the  _ totem _ , she knows now — hanging around his neck. But she’d followed his gaze, and she’d seen the awed look in his eyes at the sight of where they were, galaxies’ worth of stars shining in his eyes with recognition, even despite the chipping of the paint and the cracks in the tiles, and bile had risen up to her throat at it.

He'd looked at her curiously when she’d been quiet the rest of the way home, frowned when she'd spent the next three days holed away in her room, busying herself with pointless projects. But when she’d emerged the fourth day to awkwardly take a seat at the table, he hadn't said anything.

(He didn't have to. She barely had to look at him to see the hardened solid rock in his eyes, where the stars used to burn bright.)

* * *

She wakes up, one night, incoherent and breathless, and she wonders if she’d been drowning in her dreams. She looks up, at walls and a ceiling that look the same dark blue as the ocean in the middle of a cloudless night, and she wonders if she’s drowning awake.

_ As much fun as this has been, it’s time for me to go home. _

For a second, she’s scared to breathe.

She isn’t, she knows — her lungs still fill with air and air alone when she allows herself to take in a shaky breath — and she hadn’t been, she suspects, when snippets of her dreams flicker to life in her mind once more.

Every star in the universe, flickering against the backdrop of kind, dark eyes.

A totem resting against the hollow of a throat like a noose.

A half-smile, somehow both content and maudlin at the same time.

Zari takes in another breath, and pulls herself up to a sitting position, resting her head against the cool ocean of wall behind her.

* * *

Her father never teaches Behrad how to swim. By the time Behrad’s old enough, they’ve been running from ARGUS for two years.

Zari promises him, on her sixteenth birthday, that they’ll get to Canada someday, and she promises him she’ll spend the whole summer in the pool, teaching him how to swim.

* * *

She walks into the galley, and she sees Nate, and she sees a smile on his face, and she’s somehow furious.

He’s smiling and laughing and a part of his family left him for a world he cannot touch for fear of it breaking, and he’s happy.

He’s looking at Ray with an unabashed joy in his eyes and his hands animatedly gesturing along with his words — muffled, somehow, to Zari, even though she stands well within the range of even Nate’s quietest whispers — and Zari  _ hates _ him for it.

She doesn’t know how he can stand there, so happy and cheery and laughing, not when she’s _ drowning, drowning, drowning _ , trying to separate Behrad from Amaya, air totems from spirit totems, the warm voice she’d spent her life with from the warm voice she feels like she could’ve spent her life with.

She turns around, walks back out the galley, and when Sara finds her staring at a black screen in the parlor later, she just mumbles something about water and walks away.

* * *

She doesn’t know why she thinks of it.

(She's drowning, she remembers, and she still doesn't know what she's drowning in.)

It’s  _ stupid _ , a stupid idea spawned in a stupid, sleep-addled brain, and there’s no guarantee she’ll see what she wants to there.

(She  _ misses _ them, and she misses being  _ alive _ without gasping for air.)

But something in her — something burning and grim and still afraid of breathing — takes a hold of her and she wakes up and she looks at the walls that make her feel like she’s drowning while she’s still breathing air, and she stands up and walks out of the room.

(It takes too much out of her to put one foot in front of the other, too much to keep herself from grabbing her bag and running like she's done so often before.)

She walks to the galley first, makes herself a drink, and leaves.

(The galley, where Amaya had smirked and winked and smiled and had gently pressed a glass of sparkling water into her hand at Jax’s farewell party, where she'd seen the way Nate’s eyes had softened towards Amaya when Sara had talked about  _ family _ .)

She walks back into her room, grabs her totem, and walks out.

(The totem that was  _ his _ , the totem that hung around her neck so often lately that she barely spared a thought to the noose that she'd tied alongside it.) 

She walks into the library, into warm, brown, wooden walls and she sits down and puts her totem on and she takes a sip of the lyoga root tea.

Then she closes her eyes and when the darkness crashes over her in waves, she stops trying to breathe and swim and she lets herself be pulled down.

* * *

She wakes up on a beach, the sun shining brightly against the blue of the sky.

She raises her head, slowly, lazily, somehow already expecting the dampened midnight heads in the surf and the warm voices she wants to hear for the rest of her life and the content, maudlin half-smiles turning into a roaring laughs that rival the volume of the waves.

She raises her head, and she watches as Behrad swims strongly against the waves and as Amaya laughs like she’s never had a reason to do anything else, and Zari lets her shoulders relax.

* * *

She wakes up in the library, with Nate sitting in front of her, his eyes curious and dread-filled at the same time, and Zari looks past him, at the silver-gray walls, and she doesn’t feel like she’s drowning.

**Author's Note:**

> so i wrote this because, basically it feels like we never really,,, idk grieved amaya’s character. and i know it’s a bit weird bc amaya never died like on screen, but with maisie leaving legends it just feels like amaya’s leaving was really permanent. idk. s4 didnt ever really give anyone other than nate any like time to miss amaya and process being without her, and even nate’s thing felt weird and rushed with how he got with zari   
> (the only explanation for steelhacker, to me, is that they’re queerplatonic best buds who like making out and talking about how much they miss amaya)  
> regardless, this was me wanting to see more people sort of grieving amaya, especially zari, but also a tiny bit of mick and ray because they were so close to her (the pirates episode has a special place in my heart because of all the amaya with the boys content).  
> anyway. i finally can access all my socials again, so! comment below, tag me or slide into my DMs on twitter (@behrad_tarazis), or hmu somehow on tumblr (behrad-tarazis). I really love hearing from y’all and pls dont worry abt being awkward bc guaranteed im awkwarder :D


End file.
